Lucy Letby denied leave to appeal

[Viviennemary]

Just heard on the news Lucy Letby the convicted serial killer has been denied leave to appeal. Good decision I think. She should stay behind bars for the rest of her life.

The link up thread to the statistical analysis is fascinating, if heavy going.

I think she is innocent. It’s Lucia de Berk all over again.

And God love Sally Clarke, her case is unbearable.

(For those that missed it she had 2 cot deaths. Professor Sir Roy Meadows said “once is tragic and twice is murder” and she was convicted, on the basis of what is actually “Prosecutor’s Fallacy.” The fact that a random event (cot death) has happened doesn’t make a second unrelated random event more or less likely. Because they are random events. And you can’t have related random events.)

Many, many sub postmasters and mistresses were found guilty in a court of law. And look where we are now….

Absolutely nothing is infallible, and we owe it to everyone to reconsider if serious doubts are there.

It is not beyond the realms of possibility that a crap NHS unit wanted a scapegoat. I would imagine that one could make the same kind of statistical analysis suggesting other staff have been present at all of the recent neonatal deaths in several maternity units over the past few years.

The jury was let go for personally reasons that happens often, why on earth do you think that's something to be concerned about?

And plenty of her colleagues were not in disbelief as they had put forward their concerns and were made to apologise to her

The trial lasted ten months. The police and prosecution did an incredibly painstaking examination of the timeline on virtually a minute-by-minute basis, correlating evidence from things like door swipes, telephones, when information was input on the IT system, etc etc. Copies of those records were all available to the defence and jury.

Do we seriously believe that there was loads of evidence that would have exonerated Letby that was all kept from the jury, and that her highly competent defence didn't notice this either during the trial or after it so they could use it for the appeal?

I don't think anyone contests that the death rate dropped after she left because that unit stopped taking such vulnerable babies, although my understanding is that it dropped after she left and before that point in any event. What the evidence showed was that deaths happened during the day time when she was on day shifts, changed to night times when she was on night shifts, and stopped when she was on holiday. Hell of a coincidence if she was innocent.

No-one can 100% know whether a criminal is guilty unless they were there and saw the crime being committed. Unsurprisingly, criminals tend to commit their crimes out of the public eye and take quite a lot of trouble to cover their tracks. If we are going to require 100% proof of guilt, we might as well all become criminals, because they will be untouchable.

Door swipes, telephones, dodgy statistics, very bad science, and not a shred of forensic evidence.

The New Yorker is considered a very respectable magazine. Not a trashy magazine or tabloid. Doesn't mean the article wasn't biased, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

Medical cases like this are usually incredibly hard to prove, which is why miscreants get away with it for years. There was a male nurse who lived an hour away from my area (U.S.) that is believed to have killed hundreds before he was caught.

Exactly, it’s beyond reasonable doubt. Otherwise no one would be found guilty. Letby is guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.

Because her lawyers haven't demonstrated that there are arguable grounds for appeal.

It happens every day in the courts. No-one makes this sort of fuss about the countless occasions when common-or-garden burglars, gang members, rapists, muggers, abusers, robbers, fraudsters, dangerous drivers etc etc fail in attempts to apply for permission to appeal.

Exactly!

Reading the transcripts gives you no idea of how the witnesses presented in person. Most materially, they do not contain the volumes of written evidence presented.

I'm a nurse, I have come across nurses who think she's guilty, and some not convinced.

I actually know someone who trained with Beverly Allit. She said that although they never imagined she’d do what she did, she was known as being a strange character, behaved oddly. Whereas until suspicions were raised about timing, Lucy Letby was generally well regarded.

Such information as we have indicates that they aren't suggesting that they have evidence making the convictions unsafe; the reports say that the appeal grounds were based on arguments around applications which the trial judge refused.

They system requires convicted people to show initially simply that there are arguable appeal grounds. Letby hasn't managed to overcome that relatively low hurdle.

I followed the case closely and read most of the court transcripts. I believe she is guilty. I think she is a very, very ill woman and what is terrifying is that she could so successfully hide the sickness within her. I don't believe in the concept of evil, but I do believe there are people who only look human on the outside. Inside they are just an empty, screaming void that we will never be able to comprehend. They are an abomination and shouldn't be suffered to live.

But you don't know that "lots of facts' were left out - other than, obviously irrelevant facts. Letby was represented by extremely competent lawyers whose job, amongst other matters, was to make quite sure that all the facts that would exonerate her were presented and indeed highlighted to the jury. They were given free access to all the information the prosecution had. Are you really saying that her representatives didn't know their jobs, and didn't do their jobs? On what evidence?

Yeah. I read the New Yorker article. I don’t think she did it either.

She murdered babies, they didn't get a chance to appeal did they. Ffs.

I'm a nurse. Several years ago I started working on a new ward. In that first week, SIX patients had seizures. This was not a neuro ward, it was another medical ward where you wouldn't expect non-epileptic patients to have seizures. I was on the ward for all six of those seizures. There were jokes about me being Beverly Allit because I was the only change to the ward and the only common denominator. But it was just one of those things. A cluster of unfortunate events. Pure coincidence.

If I hadn't experienced that myself, I would not have so many doubts about LL. But I did and I do. Clusters of deaths do happen when you work with very sick patients. It is not as unexpected or improbable as the court case made it sound like. But if you have it in your head that coincidences like this can't happen, you then look for a cause. If you want to put your "cause" in prison for the rest of her life, you better make sure she gets a fair trial.

When I first read all the reports about the NYT article I had the distinct impression that it had bombshell new stuff that no-one had thought of before and which hadn't been before the jury, and was interested to see what this would be. However, when I read it I was really quite underwhelmed, because this stuff just isn't new and was argued out in front of the jury. Letby herself gave evidence explaining things like the diary entries and her habit of googling people, and her lawyers also made these arguments. Likewise the facts about the staffing problems were spelt out.

So this is not new stuff that wasn't presented to the jury: it was all fully available to them. They still found, after a ten month trial, that she was guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

Doesn't there need to be new evidence for an appeal?

But the jury, who are the ones who actually heard and saw the evidence, were totally convinced. Don't you think their view is likely to be more reliable than yours?

This is a very silly thing to say. No one here is trying to "support a child murderer". People are not saying that they think she is guilty but they support her. They're saying they are not convinced that she is guilty.

As someone said upthread, it doesn't matter what we think because we're not on the jury. But surely we don't want to say that it's sickening to question whether a jury made the right decision.

So if the poor love is innocent then who do people think murdered those babies?

Who deliberately injected at least one of them with insulin?

I seriously cannot believe that a woman is found guilty of a crime which she clearly committed, and then people read some conspiracy bollocks article and suddenly their eyes have been opened and they think they know better after a snapshot read as opposed to a six months trial.

You do know don’t you that there are convincing articles about pretty much every crime that has ever been committed calling for charges to be dropped against some of the world’s most heinous criminals?

This is a very silly thing to say. No one here is trying to "support a child murderer". People are not saying that they think she is guilty but they support her. They're saying they are not convinced that she is guilty. Actually plenty of people on here are supporting a child murderer, by definition of the fact that so many believe, based on a completely biased article, that she isn’t a child murderer and that a dreadful miscarriage of justice has occurred.